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Nothing whatsoever to do with Mars Hill Church in Seattle. Political and Social Blog. A Magazine Forum on public and private thoughts, meanderings, and odds and ends. (Disclaimer: The views held on this blog are our views, and not necessarily the views of any organisation we are involved with or represent)

The Thirty Year Papers

For those who live outside the UK, at the end of every year, government papers deemed sensitive thirty years ago are released into the public domain, unless of course they are deemed too sensitive even for today.
So today has seen the release of government papers from 1975 (which is incidentally the year I was born), and I don't quite know where to begin!
There are plans on what to do in the event of a nuclear explosion (Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister at the time, was to be taken to a secret bunker in the Cotswolds, art treasuers were to be taken to some slate mines in Wales, TV was to close down, and yet there were no plans to evacuate civillians. Always best to get ones priorities right), fears that the British economy was facing 'wholesale liquidation', the Prime Minister convinced that the BBC was overrun with hippies (although to be fair, Wilson had some degree of paranoia at the time, which may have been linked to the Altzimers diesease that took hold of him shortly after he retired), Denis Healey and Tony Benn disagreeing over policy (like it wasn't even obvious at the time), cabinet splits before the 1975 EEC Referendum (again, this is already known about, to some extent), the possibility that Saddam Hussein could have a back operation in the UK (Thank God he didn't the revelation that it was mooted as a possibility is embarrasing enough), worries about the Queen Mother going on a Concorde flight because of fears over it's safety (somewhat painfully ironic), and plans to nationalise small breweries.
All in all, the same as previous years, a no of things giving detail to incidents we already knew, minor incidents, the odd one or two that raise eyebrows, but nothing truly shocking.